Ufuoma Essi Is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound.

Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories. The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of Black women. Drawing from a range of influences including Black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and Black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne Brooks. Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class and sexuality.

Her films have been screened and exhibited at film festivals, institutions and galleries in the UK and abroad such as Lisson Gallery, South London Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, Black Star Film Festival Festival, Maysles Documentary Center, CinemAfrica Film Festival and Chisenhale Studios.

Ufuoma will use the space to push my practice forward by experimenting with sound, installation, working with 8mm &16mm film and preparing for her upcoming solo show at Gasworks in London “Is My Living In Vain”. `She will also use the space to develop work and experiment with new materials in the form of processing film as well as hold rehearsals with actors and performers and work on the production of the film.

Public Programme

Ufuoma will hold a practical filmmaking workshop, a free film screening programme. The practical filmmaking workshop depending on the budget would be working with celluloid film either a cameraless 8mm film workshop or a one-day super8 workshop shooting around Catford with local young people.

Supported by using public funding from Arts Council England #acesupported @acegrams

Also part funded buy the European Regional Development Fund and Lewisham Council

Margot Heller, Director of South London Gallery

Margot has led the SLG through significant change and expansion in terms of its artistic and education programmes, visitor numbers, buildings and staff. She led the SLG’s RIBA award-winning expansion into a former fire station building which opened in 2018 and doubled the organisation’s footprint. The SLG has run extensive education programmes for many years, including a drop-in creative space for children on a neighbouring housing estate. During her tenure Heller has curated numerous exhibitions including those with Michael Armitage, Alvaro Barrington, Chris Burden, Ellen Gallagher, Ryan Gander, Katharina Grosse, Ann Veronica Janssens, Steve McQueen, Oscar Murillo, Danh Vo, and many others. She initiated the SLG’s post graduate artist in residency in 2010, commissioned the SLG’s permanent artist-designed garden by Gabriel Orozco which opened in 2016, and acquired a significant work by Lawrence Weiner for the Fire Station building in 2021. The SLG was joint recipient of Museum of the Year 2020.